language

language

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

"An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Elegance of language may not be in the power of all of us; but simplicity and straight forwardness are. Write much as you would speak; speak as you think. If with your inferior, speak no coarser than usual; if with your superiors, no finer.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

The English Bible -- a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

In fast-moving, progress-conscious America, the consumer expects to be dizzied by progress. If he could completely understand advertising jargon he would be badly disappointed. The half-intelligibility which we expect, or even hope, to find in the latest product language personally reassures each of us that progress is being made: that the pace exceeds our ability to follow.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Kindness is a language the dumb can speak and the deaf can hear and understand.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

To have another language is to possess a second soul.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

I do not call the sod under my feet my country; but language -- religion -- government -- blood -- identity in these makes men of one country.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

It is silly to call fat people gravitationally challenged -- a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

The human face is the organic seat of beauty. It is the register of value in development, a record of Experience, whose legitimate office is to perfect the life, a legible language to those who will study it, of the majestic mistress, the soul.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

The language of the younger generation has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

The art of communication is the language of leadership.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

We have needed to define ourselves by reclaiming the words that define us. They have used language as weapons. When we open ourselves to what they say and how they say it, our narrow prejudices evaporate and we are nourished and armed.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

No literature is complete until the language it was written in is dead.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same, that it may always be considered, in algebraic language as a given quantity.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]

There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!More [01/01/2000 12:01:00]